Speaker 1: Hey there, Claudia St. John with Affinity HR Group. We are your HR partner and resource. Today I want to talk about a difficult subject, none of us like it, but occasionally in our work lives we have to terminate employees. I wanted to give you some tips on how to do this in the most compassionate way and the way that's probably going to be the most successful for you and for the employee so that you don't get into legal troubles down the road. The most important thing to understand about terminating an employee is that folks who lose their jobs, who go through that work transition, for them they go through a complete state of mourning, just as if they had lost a loved one. The stages of grief, as you may know, cycle through denial to depression to anger to acceptance and you can go back and forth and back and forth through those emotions regularly. The one thing we do know is that when employees don't see a termination coming, when it's a surprise to them, it's a shock and they stay in the mode of denial and anger longer than they would if they had seen it coming and understood it and understood the reasons behind it. The most important thing I would say to you is if you see that somebody is not working out, don't just wait until you're so frustrated you want them out the door. Start thinking now about how you can have the conversations about them. I view discipline as a stepping stone. If they do something and you're not happy about it, okay, I'm on the first step and this path leads out the door so that they see how their actions and how their responses to your discipline or responses to your feedback affects whether or not they're going to be successful. Now, oftentimes folks wait until the very last minute and then they get so frustrated they just want these folks gone. It's not to say that you can't do that, but that is the worst case scenario for letting somebody go. It has to happen sometimes when there's a violent act or something that was just such gross misconduct that you don't have the luxury of setting them on that path. But if you do, I would strongly encourage you to make sure that they see where they are along that path and that they see where that path is going. I also encourage you to be as empathetic and as possible listen as well as you possibly can, but know you're due north at the end of that termination conversation. I encourage you to have somebody else in the room with you just so that there is some documentation about how the whole conversation went down. But to truly be compassionate in what is a very, very challenging part of being a manager and being a leader is to give your employees the dignity and the respect to know how their actions contributed to that employment action. If you do, they're more likely to get to that point of acceptance and moving on. And when they're not, when they're either angry or in denial or depressed, all of their attention is on you. And if all of their attention remains on you once you've let them go, that's when you get a lawsuit. So let them see it coming, let them understand how they can improve if they can, or how the actions that they are continuing with will lead to that ultimate separation. And if you can, make sure that you set them up in a way with either helping them with a resume, telling them that you're not going to contest unemployment, making that landing as soft as you possibly can. I hope this helps. If you have any topics you'd like us to cover, please let us know. And in the meantime, I hope you have a safe and productive workweek.